Brace yourself for a preliminary haze of statistics.
Of America’s 340 million citizen, four-and-a-half million live outside the United States (a whole million of whom, interestingly, are deployed by the Federal government – as soldiers, or diplomats, or their families).
But only 6% of these expatriates are at university. To put it another way, not quite 1% of American students are studying anywhere but within the United States.
That’s a freakishly low proportion. It’s something like 30% for, say, Italy. Going to another country to earn your degree is normal in the developed world, with just this one exception. And that seems a shame, with implications for American culture, the American economy and America’s view of the world – as well as for the individual young Americans who are missing out on global experience.
Every year 32 Rhodes Scholars reach Oxford from the United States; but hundreds of thousands of young Americans ought (I suggest) to be going abroad to study too, and don’t.
What holds many of them back is simply that they can’t imagine how to do such a thing. They assume it’s complicated, or unpatriotic, or that it’s fearfully expensive, or that it will make grim linguistic demands, or even that it’s impossible; and so don’t consider the wide world as an option. And to be fair, it has been hard to find out the answers. There’s been no guide to overseas study pitched for the American market.
Until – here you’re please to imagine a surge of kettle drums, a parting of the sky, an ooing seraphic choir, a torrent of falling light, abruptly a crash of cymbals – 31 August. That’s the day my First Guidebook to International Universities will be launched.
Anyone in with children coming up to university age ought, at least, to think through the possibilities. Ninety-six percent of humanity isn’t inside the United States. A comparable proportion of human learning is on offer east of the Atlantic, west (and south) of the Pacific, north of the 49th parallel, and even south of the Rio Grande.
This book guides the reader through all the practical steps of choosing a university somewhere on the planet surface, of applying for it, and of managing the life-change that comes with getting in and going. There’s a specific guide to 101 excellent universities all about the world, and to their standards of admission.
It’s aimed at people in the United States, not least because there are so many problems endemic to undergraduate schooling there. But it might be an instructive or entertaining read for anyone interested in education.
This is sounding like a mere puff for my book, but I did want to say something else, which is that it strikes me that the mental journey of education is properly tied up with physical journeys.
Almost nine centuries ago the Holy Roman Emperor was issuing the Privilegium Scholasticum, granting the students of Bologna (the ur-university of Europe) various immunities, most importantly freedom of movement. The privilege was soon extended to other universities, including that brand new remote thing, Oxford. The Emperor encouraged such movement because it was assumed that civilisation required international intellect in order to function: the republic of letters, a commonality of thought, international webs of intellect, the corporate mind of the West. Students, teachers and ideas must be able to pass without much friction from land to land; and they have to want to pass.
Which they did. A young man would set out from his grammar school in the Alps or Warwickshire or Corfu to go, almost as the fancy took him, to Paris or Heidelberg or (horribile dictu) Cambridge. He might even venture south of the Pyrenees, where for many centuries the greatest wisdom was to be had, and where they taught not in Latin but in Arabic.
There’s nothing so stultifying as national education. It may be that a lot of the troubles of the twentieth century arose from the narrowness and chauvinism of nationalist universities in the nineteenth, busy praising their own race and its mental habits, denigrating everyone else’s. There’s something inherently sad about the idea that Germans should study at German universities, Americans at American (or even Californians at Californian universities, New Hampshirites at New Hampshirite, Connecticuters at Connecticuter).
The Rhodes Scholarship exists to lure people out of their own lands, and I remain grateful forever for being lured. I came to Oxford from twelve thousand miles away, never having been out of my small homeland, as a Rhodent (as we always called ourselves; the term seems to have dropped out of use; why?). Since my stint in Oxford I’ve had a pleasant wandering life, working as a full-time novelist, Vice Consul and journalist, tutoring and teaching at universities throughout the world. I cunningly married a U.S. diplomat; she and I, and our children, have for the last twenty years been among the million Uncle Sam sends here and there for his own purposes. It has all been fine experience, and a lot of it’s gone into this Guidebook…. Anyway, someone on this page you’ll find a screen where you can hear Celia and Richard, of Rhodes House, in conversation with me about this and that.